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Sidekiq is a background job processor for Ruby that’s relied on by thousands of Rails apps. It’s regularly used to process slow or resource intensive work in the background. The results and operations of background jobs are often critical to a business and its users. Like sending email, for example.

It’s essential that new signups get a confirmation email, accounts are charged for usage, and incoming data is indexed for searching. All of these activities are ideal candidates for being implemented as background jobs. As with any critical part of your application infrastructure, proper testing is paramount. By no coincidence, Sidekiq has fantastic support for various means of testing.

The performance and reliability of your application’s test suite hinges on the granularity with which you test each component. Features that exercise the entire stack are tested at a higher level than the individual methods that comprise a particular class. That same granular approach applies directly to testing background jobs and the Sidekiq workers that process them.

You need to know which testing modes Sidekiq is packaged with and the best practices for testing both jobs and workers. This post will walk you through evaluating each testing paradigm and show examples of how to work effectively with each.

Before proceeding, let’s define a couple of commonly used Sidekiq terms: job and worker. A job is an operation to be processed in the background. Sidekiq manages a queue of jobs within Redis as simple JSON data structures. A worker is a Ruby class, with a little Sidekiq sugar mixed in, that’s responsible for executing a job. When Sidekiq is ready to process a job, a corresponding worker is initialized and passed the job’s arguments.

Know Your Modes in Sidekiq

There are three distinct testing “modes” that Sidekiq ships with. Here’s the breakdown, straight from the GitHub wiki:

Fake. No job processing is performed. Jobs are only enqueued.

Inline. Jobs are enqueued and then processed synchronously.

Disabled. No special handling for testing. Jobs are enqueued in Redis and processed normally.

Before diving into the particulars for each paradigm, let’s review how to properly configure Sidekiq within your test suite. Changing the testing mode is done on the Sidekiq::Testing module, which is a constant and therefore global. This can cause unexpected behavior for randomized or parallelized tests, so it’s advisable to change the mode within the context of a block when possible.

require 'minitest/autorun'
require 'sidekiq/testing'
class IndexWorkerTest < Minitest::Test
def setup
Sidekiq::Testing.fake!
end
def test_that_mode_can_change_within_a_block
Sidekiq::Testing.inline do
IndexWorker.perform_async(model.id)
# This would fail in `fake` mode, no indexing would happen
assert model.reload.indexed?
end
end
end

Testing your Sidekiq workers with RSpec is smooth and wonderful, and there’s even a gem for it. However, this post is about Sidekiq, and Minitest is the default, so we’ll stick with it for the examples to keep the cognitive overhead to a minimum.

Unit Testing Workers — Start at the Bottom

Unit testing workers is simple and fast. Always start at this most granular level for testing branching logic, edge cases, or complex logic within workers.

A worker’s initializer doesn’t take any arguments, so the object isn’t instantiated with any state. This nudges your worker’s methods toward a functional style of passing objects and arguments around. Wonderfully, testing these types of pure input/output methods is simple and straightforward.

Since jobs, along with their arguments, are persisted to Redis before they are dequeued and executed, a best practice is to pass simple identifiers to the #perform_async method call instead of heavier instances of ActiveModel::Record. Instead, they’re often fetched from the database within a worker’s #perform method. This can make unit testing workers more expensive and less unit-like, so it is best to have additional methods defined so #perform can delegate down and you can unit-test with test doubles or non-persisted models.

Here is an example of a worker responsible for indexing new events so they are searchable by end users. The #perform method calls .find to load the model and then hands it off to #index_event where the real work of indexing takes place.

With complex workers that coordinate multiple tasks or rely on helper methods, this style of isolated unit testing really pays off. Tests can be faster and more focused.

Testing Worker Queuing — When Testing the Boundaries

Sidekiq’s fake testing mode operates similarly to the ActionMailer testing API, in which jobs are queued up in a .deliveries array rather than being executed immediately. Jobs within the queue can be queried, inspected, and optionally “drained” to process enqueued jobs. This mode is activated simply with the fake! directive:

Sidekiq::Testing.fake!

Testing with fake mode is the first level of integration testing with other objects, one step beyond unit testing workers. Testing this way promotes decoupled and faster tests, as the worker doesn’t have to perform any actual work.

It isn’t appropriate for full integration testing or situations where you want to process jobs during a test. For example, indexing data in a background job when you want to make assertions on finding the data during the test. The inline testing mode, discussed next, is best for these cases.

Worker queues are global and will therefore persist between tests. Unchecked, your tests will bleed state, and your test suite will become order dependent. To combat this, be sure to clear jobs between tests:

def teardown
Sidekiq::Worker.clear_all
end

Our event indexing application allows users to post new events, which need to be indexed immediately. The collaboration of those two objects is wrapped up in a form object that can be tested separately.

Making assertions against a job is extremely straight forward and doesn’t require a domain specific testing API. This style of testing can also be accomplished with stubs, but that’s more invasive and less flexible.

Testing Inline Processing — When You Need Results

Inline testing mode performs enqueued jobs synchronously within the same process, rather than asynchronously in a separate, dedicated process. This closely mirrors production behavior, but without the difficulty of multiple processes and race conditions.

Sidekiq::Testing.inline!

Inline mode bypasses Redis integration entirely. Jobs are pushed into queues and then immediately popped off and executed.

Inline processing is ideal for feature tests involving separate communicating processes, for example full stack tests that use capybara. By avoiding asynchronous job processing, you gain more predictable test runs, ones where you aren’t plagued by periodic race conditions.

Now we want to add a new integration test to our event management app. The new test simulates the happy path of a user posting a new event and then trying to find that event through search:

The test not only requires an event to be saved to the database, but the event must also be indexed to show up in search results. Using the inline mode for testing means that the indexing job is processed immediately and the results will include the new event. If the job were processed asynchronously, there is a good chance that the controller would respond before anything were indexed, a textbook race condition causing flickering tests.

Sidekiq Testing Disabled — When You Must Know Everything Works

Disabling testing altogether reverts Sidekiq back to asynchronous processing. This is the default mode that Sidekiq runs in. It relies on separate clients and servers and a real Redis instance for queuing.

Disabled mode isn’t meant for running tests; it’s called “disabled” for a reason! It is, however, an excellent way to verify that Sidekiq has the correct configuration for Redis.

Exercise Your Rights

During everyday application testing, you always test a model at the unit level. You then test how a model coordinates with other models at the boundary level. Finally, you test how it integrates with the database and other services at the functional level. Treat Sidekiq the exact same way! Follow these simple guidelines, and you’ll be off to a great start:

Use fast, finely grained, unit tests to work through edge cases and refine worker behavior.

Test the boundaries of your jobs when you’re focusing on collaboration with other objects.

Test workers inline when you need to test the output of the jobs in the context of the rest of the system.

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